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PatrickCroninThirdPaper 10 - 09 Jul 2009 - Main.PatrickCronin
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| | | The Dream | |
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< | For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He accomplished this dissolving the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic instance of a spontaneous movement by a group of people, but less dramatic and more examples exist. Take the entertainment industry, epitomized by the life and death of Michael Jackson. Or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. In each of these cases its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." Millions and millions of people came to Michael Jackson's memorial service on the 7th, and new channels still spend all day reminding us that he's still dead. They gather simply to see and hear about "The King of Pop". I'm not sure what to call this other than a "movement" -- a mass of people that see or hear something that they desire in Michael Jackson, and are moved by him for whatever reason. | >
> | For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He dissolved the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic instance of a spontaneous movement by a group of people, but more mundane examples exist. Take the daily work of the entertainment industry, exemplified by the life and death of Michael Jackson. Or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. In each of these cases its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." Millions and millions of people came to Michael Jackson's memorial service on the 7th, and new channels still spend all day reminding us that he's still dead. They gather simply to see and hear about "The King of Pop". These people see or hear something that they desire in Michael Jackson. They're moved by him for whatever reason. | | | In each of these examples, there are also people that, while they don't participate in collective desires, know how to control them. They destroy them if they become dangerous, or shape them so that they become profitable. They exploit the undetermined nature of the desire to their advantage -- either forcing it to define itself within a pre-existing political structure and thus diffusing the movement (in the case of May 1968), or adding their own content to the desire and profiting from the association (Pepsi or MTV in the case of Michael Jackson). |
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